1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a method and system for information processing and systems incorporating the present invention. Specifically, the present invention relates to three-dimensional (3D) data editing and systems incorporating the present invention.
2. Description of Related Art
Many non-intervention scanning devices produce 3D or higher dimensional data sets. For examples, in medical domains, different scanning devices such as CT, MR, and ultrasound produce data that can be stacked to form a 3D volume from a set of cross sectional slices. In archaeology, researchers utilize scanning devices to recover internal structures of a site without having to physically dig in the site. In seismic or geologic study, ultrasound devices are employed to detect the depth or structure of the underground. Similarly, in other scientific fields, data may be organized as slices in some high dimensional space.
To facilitate effective exploration of 3D data, techniques and/or tools have been developed to allow visualizing, interacting, and/or editing such 3D data. As 3D data is often presented in its projection form in a 2D space, one important issue is how intuitive and convenient a tool should be in order to support effective 3D data manipulation. Conventionally, a keyboard, a mouse, and a 2D display device are used as input and output devices to perform data manipulation on the 2D display device. 2D data manipulation can be naturally achieved via a 2D display device. For example, a user may easily draw a 2D area on a screen of a 2D display device on which a 2D image is displayed in order to segment, for example, an object of interest contained in the 2D image. On the other hand, however, it may not be as intuitive to segment a 3D object of interest (a sub-volume) contained in a 3D volume rendered as a projection on a 2D display device.
In existing 3D data manipulation systems, although 3D data may be visualized as a 3D entity on a 2D display device, 3D data editing on a 2D display device is usually achieved by editing one 2D slice at a single time. This mode of operation is awkward because while editing, it draws a user's focus to a dimension (2D) that is inconsistent with the dimension of the data itself (3D). In addition, because this mode of operation confines a user's view to a lower dimension space, it makes it difficult or requires special skills to mentally correlate what is being performed in a lower dimension space to the effect in a higher dimensional space.